Rima El El itibaren Arempula, Telangana, Hindistan
A little light on the religious/political connections, but the first half of the book is really fascinating
The single most read book by people contemplating law school. There are clear pros and cons to this. On the pro side, Turow is a good writer who structures even this supposed transcript of his memoir with a fair amount of novelistic suspense. Our hero must confront good and evil personified by his various professors (seriously, there are times when you'd think you were reading Harry Potter). Ultimately, as in a good modern novel, he must face the true nemesis that lies within (his capacity to cross over to the dark side and become an evil lawyer). Beyond entertainment, it does gently introduce the reader to the basic scene of law school with many of its organizing concepts (the curriculum, the socratic method, moot court, exam structure, etc.) and regalia (hornbooks, briefs, outlines). However, I've already heard (and believe me, I haven't been looking all that hard) much reaction to this book as painting a fairly extreme picture of Law School that just doesn't accurately describe most of the contemporary reality. Like "The Paper Chase" (the film most recommended to would-be law students), it is set in the sacred halls of Harvard Law School, where a very particular prestige-borne madness prevails. More fundamentally, it was written 30 years ago, and at a time Turow himself acknowledges as one of tense generational conflict. He suggests that it was in the wake of Watergate that lawyers suddenly took a massive plunge in the estimation of their fellow Americans, such that even beginning law students were anxious not to replicate the degraded culture of their predecessors. Inevitably, this generated a lot of conflict with the professoriate, which appears in Turow's book as deeply divided between conservative old guard who considered humiliation a basic teaching tool and younger faculty who fashioned themselves progressives. The kind of politicization of the classroom that added considerably to Turow's anxiety and self-doubt was a product of the times. I'm sure there are new campus politics now, but not the ones depicted in "One L." Above all, the general consensus I've seen is that Law School is just not so traumatic anymore. Which is not to say that the madness over prestige, getting top grades, making law review and all the rest have gone away. After all, those things have an economic basis in the corporate law firms themselves. Maybe this recession will change the field somehow...